Music: Christine and The Queens

With instant access to so much music, it's natural we've become more discerning about which artists we choose to give our time to. Maybe we've become a little impatient too, prone to overlooking something for the flimsiest of reasons. It would be foolish to pass over Christine and The

Queens because of that apparently middle-of-the-road name.

Heloise Letissier, the solo artist who bears the name, is anything but.

Much has been made of the blandness of mainstream pop in the 2010s, years where record labels attempted to recoup some of the revenue lost to downloads and streaming by banking on safe bets with the widest potential appeal. With the industry less willing to take a chance on more unusual artists, pop lost much of previous sense of the exotic, its inquisitiveness, its danger.

But when Chaleur Humaine, Letissier's first record as Christine and The Queens, went on to become the highest-selling debut album of 2014 in the UK, the industry was caught out. People like Letissier, an androgyous Frenchwoman who fuses her musical work with elements of performance and visual art, weren't meant to become popstars any more. All that art and sex was a bit too outre and, well, a bit too weird.

New album Chris sees Letissier return with a brawnier, masculine persona. The sole creator of the album after abandoning recording sessions with Mark Ronson and Damon Albarn, Letissier explained before the album's release that she had adopted the shorter name Chris.

“It had to be Chris at some point because I was bolder and stronger and had more muscle,” she told the NME. "It was natural for me to shed the rest of the stage name and to cut my hair."

Earning a glut of five star reviews, Chris is very likely the best pop album released this year. A fixture on radio playlists, lead track Girlfriend is sophisticated and sultry, an elegant disco track with recalls the cool insousiance of countrymen Daft Punk. Its follow-up Doesn’t Matter is a similarly impressive blend of smooth, intricate funk and lyrics burning with passion and personal turmoil.

Each song, like all songs on the album, are available in both English and French language versions: a boon for practising your language skills while attempting to cut some slick, Jackson-style moves. Letissier has specifically named both Michael and Janet as influences on her sound. Catch her at either of these dates to see their mark on her dancing too.

“It’s a crisis song that I wrote late one night”, she says of Doesn’t Matter aka Voleur De Soleil. “This song is a cathedral, with a rhythm as unalterable as white stone. The bass line, I remember playing it for hours, as if to rock myself.”

If, as she says, Chaleur Humaine was about her formative, bookish years, Chris is about her widening experiences as a woman who describes herself as pansexual, meaning she is attracted towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity.

“Chaleur Humaine was about teenage years, most of it,” she says. “Loneliness, really true feelings, and there is a softness in the way I wrote as well, because I was properly introducing myself. It gets to be a bit more exhilarating, because I get to say, okay, I've been introduced now.”

She adds: “Now I get to be more confident, and it matches what happened in my life. I'm out in the open and I'm having more experiences, meeting people, having relationships, and stories are happening to me. All of a sudden, you're a real grownass woman.”